


Some Other Me

by mldrgrl



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universes, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 06:49:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11709081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mldrgrl/pseuds/mldrgrl
Summary: A Request: "How many different lives would we be leading if we made different choices" Fox Mulder. A wonderful prompt for a wonderful fic, don't you think? Please? Please? (Yes, I watched All things again today and that's why I'm bothering you and all the others amazing fic writers on this site: you are too good to be left unbothered).





	Some Other Me

There’s a Fox Mulder whose sister wasn’t taken from him by aliens.  Instead, she died in a drowning accident at their summer home when she was four.  His parents separated by the time he was in sixth grade and he lived with his father outside of DC because his mother was too full of grief to care for her remaining child.  

 

Fox didn’t know very much about his father’s job when he was younger, just that his old man worked for the government, but there came a time, just after high school, that his father brought him to a gathering of men who asked him if he’d like to join their cause for the greater good.  He worked with the syndicate for twelve years, growing more and more disillusioned with their intent, but feeling helpless to extract himself.  

 

This Fox Mulder met Dana Scully inside the FBI office of Section Chief Blevins when she was being debriefed on an assignment that took her to the woods of Bellefleur, Oregon.  His job was to take the little metal implant she’d collected as evidence and make it disappear.  He could tell by the way she delivered her report that she had integrity, but he knew that before he even met her.  His other assignment was surveilling her, and he’d spent over a month watching her at work, watching her at home, watching her at brunch with her mother, watching her type her reports and emails and reading them later.

 

Dana Scully seemed like someone who could help.  He wrote her an anonymous letter in the dim blue light of his fishtank, his heart beating quickly the whole time.  He told her he had information regarding a shadow government and a conspiracy to conceal the existence of extraterrestrials and an imminent invasion.  He signed it Deep Throat and slipped it into her morning newspaper delivery.  He instructed her to tape a letter X in her window if she wanted more information.  That night, she did.

 

He had to work stealthily, knowing that if the syndicate were to discover the leak, he’d be executed before they even asked questions, but so would she, for the information he gave her.  He tried to keep his distance, but someone found out.  He didn’t know that Scully’s partner, Alex Krycek, was a double agent.

 

Fox Mulder’s body was found in an alley not far from his apartment, the supposed victim of a mugging gone bad.  The only clue was a half-smoked Morley cigarette in the pool of blood beside his head.  No fingerprints or DNA could be lifted.

 

Two days later, Special Agent Dana Scully went missing.  She was last seen at Skyland Mountain.

 

*****

 

There’s a Fox Mulder whose sister has been a constant pain in the ass to him since she was born.  She’s always pestered him, followed him night and day, stuck her nose in his business, got him into trouble, and yet, he couldn’t imagine life without her.  Especially since their parents had been killed by a drunk driver when he was only ten and she was only six.  All they had was each other.

 

Fox and Sam were sent to live with their grandparents in Virginia.  A guidance counselor at Fox’s junior high school made a big impression on him when he helped him through the grief of losing his parents.  From that time on, he decided he wanted to be a psychologist, and that he wanted to work with kids.

 

He meets Dana Scully at Sam’s wedding.  The petite redhead is a friend from Berkeley studying medicine.  Actually, she’s no longer at Berkeley, she’s working on her transfer to Georgetown for the Spring semester, where he’s just graduated.  His sister drags her over to where Fox is taking advantage of the open bar.  She demands he tell Dana Scully everything there is to know about her new school and even exchanges phone numbers for them.

 

Sam leaves Fox with her friend and turns to wink at her brother behind Dana’s back.  They are both cognizant of the fact that they’ve just been set up and the initial moments are a little awkward.  By the time Dana finishes explaining the plan for her senior thesis to Fox, something she’s tentatively calling Einstein’s Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation, he thinks he might be in love.

 

He waits until she finishes med school and he has a thriving practice to ask her to marry him.  Sam takes credit for it for the rest of their lives, sure to tell their children and their grandchildren, that if it weren’t for her, they wouldn’t be here.

 

*****

 

There’s a Fox Mulder whose sister was taken from him when she was eight and he was twelve.  He can remember being questioned a lot about her kidnapping.  He can remember policemen showing his mother little plastic bags with fabric hearts pinned to little tags inside and asking if the fabrics looked familiar.  And then one day Samantha is found, but she never speaks again and no one knows what happened to her.

 

He can remember feeling quite helpless and frustrated trying to get Samantha to talk to him.  He tried a lot, offering to play her favorite games with her if she would tell him where she’d been, but there was something weird about Samantha now.  She seemed to lack emotion.  Sometimes Fox looked at her and thought she might be a robot.

 

His parents grow weary of the responsibility of a mute, unaffected daughter, and Samantha is institutionalized by the time she’s fourteen.  Fox has just started college abroad, having won a scholarship to study at Oxford.  His first year there, he dates a soulless girl named Phoebe Green, very quickly determining she must be a sociopath.  He changes his major from Psychology to English Lit just to get away from her.

 

One of his required courses is a Myths, Legends, and Folktales class.  It’s his favorite class.  He changes his major again to Cultural Studies, fascinated by how many cultures have myths for the same phenomena and he grew determined to find a link between them.  He writes his first book, Around the World with Bigfoot, when he’s still in graduate school.  

 

He returns to Massachusetts to settle in Boston and research and write.  When his father dies, he realizes it’s been at least twelve years since he’s seen his sister.  His mom is too emotionally fragile to deal with Samantha, so Fox goes to the hospital where she lives to give her the news in person.

 

Samantha’s doctor is young, too young to be a doctor, Fox thinks.  She looks even younger than Samantha.  Despite her youthful appearance and small stature, Dana Waterston proves to be a wonderful doctor.  He’s grateful for her presence as he awkwardly tries to navigate a one-sided conversation with his stoic sister.  There’s just something about her.  He starts visiting his sister frequently, and regularly after that.

 

He isn’t aware that Dr. Waterston is married until she turns him down for coffee one day.  She doesn’t wear a wedding ring, so it wasn’t obvious to him.  He still comes to see his sister though, because he can’t fight the urge just to stop cold turkey.  A few weeks later, Dr. Waterston surprises him by asking  _ him _ out for coffee.

 

She tells him her husband is cheating on her and he’s astounded that anyone would even dream of being unfaithful to her.  She also admits that he’d left his wife for her when she’d been his med student, and that he can believe.  He doesn’t know the first Mrs. Waterston, but he can’t imagine anyone more perfect than Dr. Dana….call her Scully now, as she’ll be returning to her maiden name when her divorce is final.

 

A few weeks later, Dr. Scully confesses to him that she read his book - the one about the Loch Ness Monster and other sea creatures.  Does he really believe in those things?  Her father is a retired sea captain and no, he’s never seen a mermaid or a selkie.  That she knows of, he tells her.  I believe in science, she says.  Facts.  The answers are there, you just need to know where to look.  

 

He likes to argue with her about science and myth, getting her to raise that skeptical brow of hers the more incredulous the tales he spun.  Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?  What do you know about The Philadelphia Experiment?  Don’t you know the difference between a wendigo and a werewolf?  It’s classic vampirism, Dr. Scully.

 

Soon, Dr. Scully’s residency in Boston ends and she is transferred to a hospital in San Jose.  Fox Mulder follows her.  He can write anywhere and he’s been thinking about writing a book about the chupacabra anyway.  He heard through one of his newsgroups there’d been a sighting in Fresno and it’s not that far.

 

He follows her to Atlanta, where he researches a few haunted bridges.  He follows her to Phoenix, where he befriends a fascinating Native American man named Albert Hosteen and learns about Navajo codetalkers.  And he follows her to Tallahassee where he falls down a hole chasing what he insists are relatives of the Mothmen of West Virginia.  Dana has to stitch his head and set his shoulder after that little trip to the forest.

 

After Florida, she tells him that he doesn’t need to follow her anymore.  Just come  _ with _ her.

 

*****

 

There’s a Fox Mulder who lived a normal, boring childhood in Chilmark with nothing very interesting to tell.  His family spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard where he was a lifeguard during high school.  He had a girlfriend named Amy who everyone thought he would marry, even he thought he would marry her, but it turns out, Amy was the only one that didn’t think they were perfect for each other.  She ended their relationship the first year Fox went away for school.

 

His girlfriend dumping him was just about the worst thing that had ever happened to Fox.  He decided to take a few years off to find himself.  That’s what he told his parents and they thought he was wasting his potential.  His mother told him that there were other fish in the sea.  His father even offered to set him up with a prostitute, an offer he found both amazing, coming from his stuffy father, and disturbing.

 

He doesn’t really know what led him towards the path of law enforcement, but he found himself drawn to the idea of being an FBI agent.  He only needed a high school education to apply, and high school had been a breeze for him.  He passed all the entrance exams, psychological, and physical tests with flying colors.  All those years running on the beach helped him get in shape, though it wasn’t obvious to look at him.

 

He met Dana Scully in the academy and he was nervous to talk to her.  She looked like she might be harboring a crush on one of their instructors, Jack Willis, the way she hung on every word he said.  The guy didn’t seem that impressive, so he wasn’t sure what she saw in him.

 

She beats the pants off of everyone at the shooting range and when he later asks her how she got to be such a great shot, she shrugs and tells him she has two brothers.  It takes him awhile to ask her out, and she flat out turns him down.  She calls him Mulder, as the instructors tend to do, so he calls her Scully.

 

He doesn’t really make any friends at the academy and spends a lot of time alone, running.  He runs laps on a track at a local high school outside Quantico and he’s surprised one day when she joins him.  She doesn’t say anything at first, and neither does he.  He can tell she struggles to keep pace with him, but he doesn’t slow down because he’s pretty sure she’d be insulted.

 

Gradually, he learns a little more about her.  She has a sister, as well as the two brothers.  Her father was Navy.  Her older brother is Navy.  She was in med school until she was recruited, and she’s not sure if her parents have forgiven her yet.  They so wanted her to be a doctor, but she felt like she could make a difference at the FBI.

 

As they near the end of their training, he wonders if he’ll ever see her again.  His focus was on behavioral studies and hers was on forensics.  He was headed to an office in the main branch in DC and she was headed to the labs at Quantico.  At graduation, she introduced him to her sister, Melissa, the only member of her family to show up for the event.  Melissa stared at him as though she could see right through him and it made him uncomfortable.  He told her he’d keep in touch and he meant it.  He was determined to find any excuse to see her again.

 

He only had to make excuses a handful of times before she told him she had decided to take him up on his offer for dinner from nearly six months ago.  They moved in together after only a few short months of dating, but never married.  Scully became the head of forensics at Quantico by the age of thirty-five.  The youngest department head they’d ever had, and the first female.  Mulder rose to Assistant Director heading the Violent Crimes Unit, but didn’t really like telling people what to do.  He stayed in the position for a few years before taking a teaching position at Quantico.  He likes it much better there and it’s so much easier to sneak in some time with Scully while they’re in the same building.

 

*****

 

There’s a Fox Mulder who was taken from his living room when he was twelve years old as his sister stood helpless and in shock.  She ran next door to where her parents were having dinner and screamed that a white light made her brother disappear.  He was never heard from again and his disappearance was classified as unsolved.

 

*****

 

There’s a Fox Mulder who spent a good portion of his teen years and early 20’s believing that his sister had vanished one night from home while his parents were out and he was asleep.  Only after experiencing disturbing nightmares and a few sessions of regression hypnosis did he come to understand the truth of what had happened: his sister had been abducted by aliens.

 

Of course, his friends and colleagues thought he was crazy.  His fiancee, Diana, left him.  His superiors, once quick to refer to him as the golden boy of the FBI, seemed determined to make his life hell after he began requesting access to unsolved cases commonly referred to as X-Files.

 

Dana Scully is assigned to him on March 6, 1992.  They begin with a handshake.  Eight years later, Mulder lays in bed, with Scully’s naked body next to his, her head on his chest, and wonders if she’s right about all the paths that led them to this moment.  If there is such a thing as fate or if he could be leading a different life right now.  All things considered, he’s pretty happy with the one he has right now.

 

The End


End file.
